COMMERCIAL TOOLS FOR THE INTELLIGENT DISTRIBUTOR

Establishing world-class commercial capabilities

"It is incredibly powerful to walk into a customer meeting armed with this kind of insight and information. It makes us much more credible and competitors have nothing like this."

THE CHALLENGE

Running a distribution business can be tough, and requires thousands of commercial decisions to be made correctly and efficiently daily. The CEO of a $1 billion distributor of industrial products saw a significant opportunity to upgrade the company's commercial capabilities. Everyday the sales force made several hundred vital commercial decisions, with fairly limited insight and support: decisions on how to prioritize opportunities, how to price products, and where to spend time. The CEO believed that by equipping the sales force with the tools and insight to make smarter, faster, and better decisions, significant value could be unlocked.

“We are looking to build world class commercial capabilities and we think this is worth over $100M in annual margin impact"

CEO

What we did

APPLIED POWERFUL YET PRACTICAL SCIENCE

We applied powerful yet practical science and analytics to get to the “answer” on key commercial value levers. This meant rapidly understanding things like “true north customer profitability,” customer lifetime value, and the most structurally attractive customers, market opportunity, and current penetration.

DEVELOPED MAGNETIC TOOLS THAT DROVE IMPACT

We developed magnetic web tools that use the “answer” to help the sales force make smarter decisions. These tools took the form of an iPad-based commercial toolkit, which helped the field with important decisions such as: which opportunities are the most valuable, how should I spend my week, how do I prepare for a customer conversation, and how do I price products.

ENGAGED THE FIELD TO GENERATE PULL CHANGE

We engaged the field to generate "pull change" and thus to make the commercial impact truly sustainable. We coined the term "for the field by the field" and worked closely with the field to drive adoption and make their lives easier as the toolkit was rolled out. Over 150 sales reps contributed to the design, development, and rollout, generating real “pull” for the toolkit.

IMPACT

A COMMERCIAL TOOLKIT FOR THE SALES FORCE

We built and embedded an iPad-based commercial toolkit for the sales force.

RAPID ADOPTION AND TANGIBLE BOTTOM LINE IMPACT

The company saw rapid adoption of the toolkit and a bottom-line impact that exceeded expectations.

The result was an integrated commercial toolkit that was rapidly adopted by the field and that drove significant commercial benefit.